Good Grief, It’s the Holidays
The Christmas holiday season can be the most joyous and magical time of the year, but for many, it is the most stressful and depressing. If you are dreading the holidays, you’re not alone. Many people find that Christmas is the most stressful time of the year. There is a lot of societal pressure to “enjoy” the holidays. It’s a time for tradition, but if [...]
Understanding the Unique Nature of Trauma
If you’ve lived through trauma, then you know that it can impact every aspect of your life, from your mind, body, and spirit to your relationships and everyday life. Unfortunately, trauma from the past doesn’t stay there. It can follow you and show up in insidious and persistent ways throughout your life. Sometimes it can stem from a single event like a car accident [...]
What Makes a Codependent Narcissist Compulsively Lie?
It’s the most confusing and painful thing when someone you care about seems to be unable or incapable of telling the truth. You’re left always wondering why your loved one can’t be honest and what his or her motives are for deceiving you. It may amaze you to learn that this behavior has nothing to do with you at all, and they could be [...]
Online Marriage Counseling: Benefits and Potential Problems
Since the days of the pandemic, we have become a society that has grown accustomed to online answers for everything. From shopping to medical care, we search the web to find the right place for our needs. The desire for online marriage counseling has grown over the past few years. Couples who want to connect with a counselor scour the web to find the [...]
How to Nurture a Healthy Attachment Style
There’s something beautiful in the fact that broken things can be mended. There’s a Japanese art called “Kintsugi,” a word that means “join with gold.” This art is traditionally about using gold lacquer to repair broken objects, typically ceramic pottery or glass. The broken pieces are joined together using the lacquer, and the result is a stunningly beautiful object that looks all the more refined [...]
5 Ways to Get Rid of Family Rifts
No matter how close a family is, people are bound to have conflicts. This is especially true within the confines of a family dynamic. People often see the best in their families. This, paired with a spirit of competition, can lend itself to complex family relationships, taking sides, and inevitably, family rifts that are hard to repair. When a parent is angry with a [...]
Nurturing Teen Health: Fostering the Well-being of Your Teenager
There are all kinds of jobs out there, all with their own level of difficulty and deep joys attached to them. Some work has long hours and requires years of training, some work is dangerous, and some requires a high level of skill. Among these many types of work and vocations, parenting and nurturing a young person might be one of the more demanding [...]
Separating Fact from Fiction About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
For most people, separating fact from fiction when it comes to understanding mental health disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) poses a real challenge. “It just makes her excessively clean; that’s not a bad thing.” “So, what if he’s a little uptight? Doesn’t everybody have their quirks?” These are just two of the many misconceptions that exist in people’s minds regarding living with the disorder. It [...]
Finding Healing and Learning to Cope with Disenfranchised Grief
We all experience grief at some point, and this universal experience darkens our doorsteps in various ways. Grief is never easy, regardless of how it comes to us. Losing something or someone that meant something to you can trigger a lifelong process of coming to terms with that loss. Grief can be harder to process when it isn’t acknowledged, validated, or supported by your family, [...]
Help for Menopause and Anxiety in Vancouver, WA
We are aware of the process of menopause. It is a time in a woman’s life when hormones shift, and she stops menstruating. Instead, she prepares to begin a new life full of adventure for her third act. We may be surprised to learn that during the time of menopause and the years preceding (perimenopause), various symptoms can creep up. These symptoms can include insomnia, [...]